Tag Archives: republican dysfunction

“Good News! You are really poor,” or words to that effect, the Covered California website flashed when I tried to test drive the application for ObamaCare. Attempting to see what a single person, living only on Social Security, would pay for any level of health insurance, I met that “Good News” message and the suggestion I should go to Medicaid. There was no link offered. I tried variations of personal situations and found equally incomplete, dead-end and baffling responses. Maybe the site was jammed by other journalists trying it out. After all officials announced that over 5 million people tried to get on in the first three days. Oh, they just walked that back. Did they say 5 million? They meant 500,000. Anyone can make a mistake. But the magnitude of this rounding error doesn’t fill one with confidence.

One of the cardinal rules of politics is never to interrupt your adversary when he’s digging himself a hole. The Republicans are missing a great opportunity. They are clearly losing the messaging battle and are taking the majority of the blame for the shutdown of government and the tension over the upcoming Debt Ceiling Crisis. All of this over ObamaCare.

Without going into the substance and dealing only with politics and optics, this should be a no brainer and easy win for Republicans. The Democrats will certainly not bail them out of their self-destructive strategy to hold the economy hostage to their antipathy towards health insurance. Why then are they bailing out the Democrats by not letting the mess that is the Affordable Health Care roll out fall and fail under its own considerable complexities? Why don’t they just get out of the way?

The law passed some years ago. Still, many states offering “exchanges,” such as California, haven’t been able to create websites to handle the traffic, the queries and the applications. The sites crash, the applications disappear and the questions need live support for the public to respond honestly.

I know many Democrats spin that the Republicans real fear is that ObamaCare will succeed. Well, little in this amazingly inept roll out would lead any non-partisan observer to believe that. Over 50% of the public says they don’t understand the plan. And yes, the Republicans have issued a lot of false information. But they really needn’t have. The nearly 50% of the public that believes it does understand the plan is either ill-informed or lying.